[imnotlost]

There is a well-worn joke in the economics profession that involves two economists – one young and one old – walking down the street together:

The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, “Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!”

Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, “Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.”

[jjav]

> “Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.”

I don't remember too much from my finance courses in business school but one comment from the professor always stayed with me. He said that if there was any succesful pattern to trading, there are firms on wall street which can afford many orders of magnitude more brain power and compute power than you, so they will zero in on it pretty quick if it works. As soon as they do, it doesn't work anymore. Proof: Otherwise they would all be making infinite profit.

Makes sense. This means any trading algorithm that can be programmed is pretty much obsolete (if it ever was any good) by the time it's working.

[tim333]

Then how come this guy became worth $25bn through algo trading? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

[whimsicalism]

Replace the twenty dollar with the tens of millions at minimum if basic technical analysis (ie. dead cat bounce level stuff) is leveragable and yeah I think you have a pretty close approximation to reality: more likely you are hallucinating than you found $20 million on the street.

[arvinsim]

Isn't this related to the efficient market hypothesis?